Simulation of knitted products requires images of the yarn making up the knitting stitches or the like. Herein, high-quality yarn images are a must for achieving realistic simulations. For yarn image inputting, the yarn image is input by setting the yarn in a scanner to capture thereby a yarn image in which portions where color and ground color differ are equated to yarn. The yarn image thus captured is used, among other purposes, for simulating a knitted product (Patent Reference 1).
The present inventors have observed that capturing a yarn image using a white background yields a whitish yarn image, whereas capturing a yarn image using a black background yields a blackish yarn image. A likely cause for this is mixing of the background image with the image of the yarn in such translucent portions as yarn fluff and the like, which results in whitish images for white backgrounds, and blackish images for black backgrounds.
Mixing of the background image and the translucent portions of the object image, and the difficulties involved in separating the two, is a problem not only in yarns but also in textile products such as garments and/or glass products. In textile products such as garments, the background image and the textile product image become mixed in fluff portions, mesh holes, and portions where the fabric is very thin, the respective images becoming then difficult to separate. In transparent objects such as glass products or the like, the background image is visible through the glass, becoming difficult to separate from the image of the glass product proper.
Patent Reference 1 WO 03/032203A1